SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

BADLANDS SD Perry

October, 1952

In Korea, October was the only month that didn’t eat a bag of dicks, in Sergeant Edward West’s humble opinion. Between the sweltering deep green of the monsoon season and the icy slide into brutal winter, there were a few short weeks of relief. The leaves start to change, the humidity drops below fifty per cent, the days are mild. The ever-present stink of kimchi and human waste seem to ebb. It was only West’s second October in Korea, wasn’t like he had a whole lot of evidence, but he thought two was enough to say. He’d be out before a third, thank Christ, FIGMO whether the talks went on or not – the big R was scheduled for January.

And then what? Factory work? Management? Car sales? He walked slow, his handful of boys strung out in front of him. The gung-ho young West who’d proudly signed up for WWII was long gone, mislaid in the cold winter and spring of 1945 somewhere between Marche and Mauthausen. He’d gone home broken, an old man still in his 20s. Civilian life was a depressing horror show; blind, idiot smiles everywhere he looked. He lost a couple of jobs, drank too much. When Uncle Sam had called him up in ’50 with a better pay grade for a little police action over in Korea, he’d listened. Like a fucking idiot.

At least here you’re doing something useful. Keeping his guys in one piece, that had to count for something.

Burtoni held up his hand and everyone froze. West listened, scanned the stand of trees to the north, the low foothills east; it was rocky, hilly terrain anyway, but this close to the mountains there were spider holes and tunnels. He heard a scratching, rustling sound, low and close…

Young grinned, pointed two o’clock, and then they were all grinning.

“Mole?” drawled Cakes. His real name was Earl Dupree but everyone called him Cakes, short for Jonnycakes. The kid was a hillbilly. He was also a mouth with a temper, and built like a tank. He never got shook, and was a bear cat with an M1 Garand.

Burtoni took a step back, peered at the small, furry ass of whatever creature was clawing into a rise of leaf-strewn dirt near a stunted maple. “Shrew.”

Private Young wrinkled his nose. “It’s a vole.”

“What the fuck’s a vole?” Cakes glared at Young. “You’re shittin’ me, a vole?”

“I shit you not,” said Young, holding up two fingers. If anyone was still a boy scout, it was Davey Young. “It’s a gray red-backed vole.”

Burtoni chuckled. “You made that up.” His accent was all Brooklyn. That was dat. The voice matched his narrow face and quick eyes. West liked him out front for the walk. “It’s gray an’ red, anybody coulda come up with that.”

The medic, Kelly, raised his eyebrows at Young.

Young shrugged. “My girl sent me a book.”

Addison spoke up. He rarely did, a family man counting the days. Addy had two children already and a third on the way. “A book on voles?”

“On nature of the Korean Peninsula,” Young said. “Like, wildlife and trees.”

“Aw, you and your gook thing,” Cakes sneered, and thumped him on the shoulder.

“Alright, dry up,” West finally interrupted. “We’re standing here like targets.”

They started walking again. West heard birds, the rustling of trees, the shuffle of their feet. Thoughts of the future were set aside; he’d been lulled by the season, the routine, an hour’s walk north and back, uneventful for months. They were reserve and currently too far from the DMZ to have to worry about the hordes attacking, but he should have been paying attention. The commies were a sneaky bunch.

Brilliant red leaves scattered by from a stand of maples a quarter mile away, on a breeze that smelled like smoke. Behind them, a sound, a patter. Footsteps.

West turned, brought up his rifle. Three people had suddenly appeared at the top of a low, rocky rise southwest of their position, not fifty feet away.

Goddamn Korean topo!

“Backs in,” West said. “Burtoni, Addy, watch our six.”

It was two old people and a boy, maybe eight or nine years old. They carried sagging, tattered packs and were filthy, hatless and sunburned. The boy was skinny as a slat cat. When they looked down and saw the soldiers, they froze.

“Hey, Mac,” the boy called, holding up a hand. He spoke briefly to the old people. Grandparents, looked like. They raised their hands, both of them stepping closer to the child.

West relaxed a little bit, trusting his instincts. North Joes sometimes dressed up like refugees, but not these people. “You speak English?”

“Number one, Mac,” said the boy. He lowered his hands slightly. “South Korean. KATUSA, Mac, ROK number one, USA!”

“Anybody see anything?” West said, keeping his voice low, and got a mumbled chorus of negatives. “Keep watch. Cakes, keep these fine people covered. Young, you’re with me.”

“Hooah,” another gentle chorus. Heard, understood, acknowledged. Cakes moved out to flank them.

The threesome hadn’t moved, which meant they had to walk up a slight rise to meet them. West kept his own carbine easy. He smiled up at the boysun, watched him smile back. The kid’s smile was wide but didn’t touch his eyes.

“Sarge, if you think I can talk to them…” Young began.

“Zip it. You’re who we’ve got.” Young was always practicing with the kids in the village southeast of the 33^rd’s base camp. They’d been waiting for a new interpreter since they lost Billy J to Seoul in August, and West couldn’t bring himself to tap one of the ROKs, not with Cakes on the walk.

They stopped in front of the trio. West looked at the elderly couple. The old man blinked. The old woman’s mouth quivered. They looked a thousand years old.

“Where are you coming from?” West asked the boy, gesturing back the way they came.

“Keigu at MASH, GI Joe, eighty-leven,” the boy said. “Clean for you? Take out trash, laundry? All the officers I do. Cheap, Mac, good deal. The best.”

“You know where the 8011^th is?” West asked Young.

The PFC shook his head. “They’re supporting 5^th Division and that regiment from Australia,” he said. “North of Yanggu, maybe? They could be closer.”

Long walk. “Where are you going?” West asked the boy.

He raised one bony arm, pointed northeast. “Ch’alu’un. Home.”

West knew there were a couple of small villages out that way, goat herders or something, locals who’d gradually filtered back since the talks had stalled.

The old man looked over his shoulder, back the way they’d come. He sang his strange tongue at the boy, his tone anxious.

“What’s he saying?”

Young frowned, listened. “Uh, he says they have to go, they have to hurry… they have to get home before the light of… before the moon rises? I think.”

“Where’s the fire?” West leaned down a little, smiled at the boy again. The kid’s shining dark eyes seemed fathomless. “Why now?”

Boysun didn’t answer, and the old woman started talking. West didn’t need an interpreter to catch her desperation, her fear. Her old voice broke as it rose and fell.

Young was frowning. “Something – about a bell? Then, you have to let us go… Jabi, jabi... Mercy? I think mercy.”

West’s adrenaline machine started back up. They were in a hurry, all right. What were they running from?

Young stammered his way through a sentence. The old man said something, Young said something. The old man repeated himself, slowing his words down.

“Come on,” West said, starting to feel impatient. They’d been standing still for too long.

“I don’t know,” Young said. He tilted his helmet back, wiping at his brow. “He says that the priests are waving their lanterns, something like that. Then… gangshi? I don’t know the word. He says we should go home, too.”

“Try again.”

Another stilted exchange, and Young shook his head. “I’m sorry, Sarge. He just keeps saying it’s not safe and you have to let ‘em go.”

“Some superstitious thing?” It sounded right, home before dark, priests waving lanterns. West remembered when one of the ROKA kids back at base had flipped his wig over someone whistling at night, saying that it attracted spirits.

“You got me, sir.”

Behind them, Burtoni. “Hey! We got—”

The rattle of a burp gun drowned him out and West ducked and spun, saw Kelly go down, saw Addy fall. West raised his weapon, searching. Next to him, Young grabbed his gut and fell to his knees, and then Cakes and Burtoni were firing back, there, two-hundred feet and ten o’clock, movement at the top of a low rock formation. Rock chips flew. West yelled for everyone to get down but his voice was lost to the old woman’s scream, a terrible high wailing, and the deeper rattle of return fire.

Again, that flash of movement, a head bobbing up – and then the rocks spat up blood, a distinct spray of gore rising into the air. Cakes or Burtoni had gotten the fucker, taken the top of his head off. Cakes fired once more and the Garand’s clip popped, ping! In the ringing aftermath there was only the sound of the old woman, sobbing. Nothing moved but the wind.

“Call it in!” West shouted, and then Burtoni was on his knees next to Addy, pulling at the radio. Addison wasn’t moving. Kelly had his hands clapped to his throat, blood gushing through his fingers. Cakes grabbed for Kelly’s medkit and dumped it out, his thick fingers rummaging. If there were more shooters, they were all fucked.

West dropped to his knees next to Young, saw the pool of blood at his gut. Young turned panicky blue eyes up to him, breathing in choppy little gasps. Burtoni babbled their position into the radio, his voice breaking… medevac… three wounded. Cakes cursed, a steady stream of expletives as he held a stack of red gauze to their medic’s throat.

“Hurts,” Young said.

“I know it does,” West said, pulling off his shirt, balling it up to press to the kid’s stomach. “Don’t talk. Choppers are coming.”

The old woman had stopped crying, at least. West looked up and saw that the travelers had disappeared, like they’d never been there at all.

After the eggbeaters came and went, Sarge ordered them back to camp, his face grim. Him and Cakes were both blood-spattered and didn’t talk much, which was a good thing, since PFC Peter Antony Burtoni was point back to base and he didn’t want to miss a mouse farting. They’d been flanked by four gooks without even knowing. Addy and Kelly were dead and who knew about Young? Burtoni was clanked up, edgy, and the whole way back he was bugging his eyes out at everything. How many more lone Joes were out there, creeping behind the low hills, clinging to the shadowy rocks?

The only conversation was between Cakes and Sarge, about what had happened. Cakes said it was a setup with the kid and his grandparents but the sarge didn’t think so, he said they were running from something. Seemed like a pretty big coincidence in Burtoni’s book, but he was too busy straining to hear and see and smell everything to think too much on it. He was glad that Sarge and Cakes were with him. They were both hard-boiled, but by the time they got back to camp, Burtoni was out of gas.

He got a shower and ate, and drank enough coffee to give him the squirts, but he couldn’t get his mojo back. He was actually making plans to hit the sack as soon as it got dark but Sarge came over just when the shadows were getting long. Young had made it out of surgery at the 8011^th MASH and was doing fine. Sergeant West and Young’s best buddy, PFC Kyle McKay, were heading out in twenty, Cakes was driving… Did Burtoni want in? And how! If anyone deserved to see a few familiar faces when he woke up, it was Young.

Young was always good for a smoke and a joke, he was always smiling. He was real smart, too, but he wasn’t no high hatter about it. This one time, they’d all been sitting at mess talking about how shitty Korea was and how they never should have come in, and Young had started explaining all the politics, like with Korea being so close to Japan and what the Soviets wanted to do, and how bad that would be for the rest of the world. Burtoni had stopped giving a shit if the commies took over about ten minutes after he’d set foot on Korean soil. The gooks could all take a flying fuck as far as he was concerned, but the way Young told it… He said what they were doing was important, stopping the Reds, and he really believed it. Burtoni still hated the fucking place with his whole heart, and prayed every day to go home. No conversation was going to change that, but it had made him feel a little better, like at least it wasn’t all for nothing.

Besides which. Burtoni had heard that the MASH units were nice, clean, lots of drafted doctors and support personnel with no interest in mitt flopping to the brass. Decent chow, hot water, less horseshit… and nurses. American women of the Army Nursing Corps. He’d never been to one of the mobile hospitals but the fellas talked, saying that for every battleaxe stomping around there were three Doris Days looking to hold hands and kiss it better. Plus a Jane Russell or two thrown in, for thinking about later.

Burtoni needed to see a pretty face, some baby-doll ready to hear some sweet talk from a well-mannered Catholic boy like himself. There had to be at least a few lookers in the pack, but he was entirely prepared to compromise. War was hell. He got his kit together, his exhaustion turning to a kind of wired giddiness. He was famous back home for having a way with the ladies. Maybe he could salvage something from this clusterfuck of a day.

Full dark and Cakes drove them along a beaten track headed south and west, headlights illuminating a sea of nothing but trees and hills and rocks. The night was cold and damp. The wind whistled through the Jeep’s buttoned flaps, and the heater didn’t work. McKay, a skinny redheaded guy, sat in the back with Burtoni but kindly kept his phiz shut for most of the trip, an hour and a half of ass-cracking potholes and Cakes snapping his cap about them. Sergeant West stared out into the dark, thinking whatever it was he thought about. Burtoni focused himself on the promise of talking up some split-tail Sheba, trying not to see what he kept seeing in his head – Addy, falling, shot in the face, never to see his rugrats again. Kelly bleeding out into the rocks a million miles from home.

Finally, they crested a low rise and there were lights ahead, lights and shitloads of tents and Quonset huts tucked between two hills. Burtoni studied the place through the smeary window. There were some beat up crash wagons just north of the camp, the white-outlined crosses they wore flocked with mud. He counted three copters parked some distance away. Cakes swung around south, past a couple of long barracks buildings to the motor pool in back. Farther south was a camp village, dark hooches stretching out of sight.

A short corporal with peepers and a baby face signed them in and gave them the dope on the place, pointing to a hand-drawn map on the wall – mess, guest quarters, post-op, NCO club. The sarge asked where the honcho was and the corporal, name of O’Donnell, said he’d still be in his office; CO was a bottle-cap colonel called Sanderson. The sarge got a sour look at the name. He hid it quick, but Anna Burtoni hadn’t raised no knuckleheads. If Sarge didn’t like the guy, neither did Burtoni.

Sarge said he was going to talk to Sanderson and sent them ahead to see Young. McKay led the way through the tent town, and Burtoni quickly surmised that the 8011^th pretty much beat the living snot out of their Company base. It didn’t smell like shit, for one thing, but also the walkways were packed and smooth, and most of the tents had real floors. Buzzing lamps, swarmed by moths, sent down smooth planes of yellow light, cutting cleanly through the shadows. Someone had planted flowers along the bases of the Quonset huts. Most of ‘em were dying, but still. Some of the guys walking past were regular army, tucked and spiffy, but there were some real slobs, too, and no one saluted. He even saw a pair of Joes walk by wearing nonreg civvies, cackling like hens.

“Where’s all the gooks?” Cakes asked, and Burtoni finally noticed the most obvious difference. The Koreans who lived in the 33^rd’s little camp town went to bed early, but there were always workers and sellers hanging around, kids running errands, the occasional slicky boy looking to boost anything that wasn’t nailed down. At the 8011^th, he didn’t see a single Korean face.

“You got the eagle eye, Cakes,” he said, and Cakes laughed, started to say something back, and then just stood still, his mouth hanging open. Dames, dead ahead.

Burtoni got an eyeful of the pair. The one on the right was blond but older, probably in her thirties, and had a sharp look to her, like she was just waiting to dish out some knocks. They got closer, passed beneath one of the buzzing lights, and Burtoni caught the gold leaf. Jeez, but she was a major!

The other one, though. The gal walking with her was soft and curvy and doe-eyed, her dark hair pulled back in a pony-tail. She was a second looey and a bona fide honey.

“Fazangas,” Cakes breathed, just when they got in earshot.

“Go chase yourself, Private,” snapped the pretty one, hardly looking at them. Her voice was music. Major Blondie gave them a shriveling glare as they passed.

“Forget about him, ma’ams,” Burtoni said, turning to call after them. “His mama dropped him on his head.”

The gals kept walking but the angel glanced back. Burtoni smiled his best smile and her lips were twitching when she turned away.

“What are you, stupid?” Burtoni asked Cakes, who was inspecting their departing back sides, his mouth still hanging open. “You gotta be a gentleman you wanna make time.”

“I got time UTA,” Cakes said, in his ridiculous accent: ah got tahm. “All I need’s a share crop.”

Cakes was disgusting. Burtoni shook his head. He’d make a point of asking around about the dark-haired angel, though they’d likely be on their way back to camp early in the morning. Even seeing her again was a long shot.

“Fazangas,” Burtoni muttered darkly, and slapped the back of his hand against Cakes’ chest. “You should shut up more, you know that?”

“You shut up, ya wop,” Cakes rumbled.

McKay had stopped and was waiting for them, his face somber. Right, Young. Burtoni sighed and started walking again. His heart had been stolen away for a minute, but he was recovered. There’d be more nurses in with the patients and it was still early, barely 19:30. After they saw Young, he’d ditch Cakes ASAP and see if he couldn’t make some magic happen.

Admin was behind the surgery at the southwest corner of the compound and West headed that direction, wondering if Sanderson had changed. Anything was possible. He wasn’t keen on seeing the man again but wanted to ask about the refugees they’d run across earlier. Common sense told him that Cakes was right; either the whole thing had been a setup or the North Joe had threatened the ragtag family, made ‘em target bait… but his gut still said something else. If he didn’t ask, he wouldn’t sleep. Addison and Kelly had been his guys, they’d been good men.

Robert Sanderson. Eight years before, West had been a PFC to Robert’s silver eagle for a brief but memorable push in the first weeks of 1945, taking territory back from the German army after their Christmas offensive. More than half of the guys West had started out with were KIA by then and the rest of ‘em got assigned to a command under Captain Sanderson, who’d had his ranks blown to shit on Boxing Day. Thanks to the captain, West lost three more buddies on a frozen street in some nameless little village east of Weiler. Sanderson ordered them to check the bodies of some dead soldiers and blammo.

West could understand a mistake – could sympathize, even, having made a few of his own – but Sanderson hadn’t owned up. In fact, he had fallen all over himself to pass the buck to one of the dead men, a sergeant called Richie Mullens. West had respected the hell out of Sergeant Richie, who’d been with him since near the beginning, who’d literally kept him alive when he was still Johnny Raw. Sanderson had insisted that he’d given the order based on the sergeant’s advice, which everyone knew was applesauce; the Sarge would have known better. Before anyone could get too worked up, Captain Sanderson had discovered some pressing business at the rear line and West had been folded into an infantry division headed southwest.

The camp lights hummed, illuminating the few people he passed in murky yellow-white – a young man on crutches with his left lower leg missing, a trio of nurses, a slouching doctor in a Hawaiian shirt. The cool air felt good, waking him up a little, but it smelled like ashes.

Admin was in the last Quonset hut, ahead and on his right. As he approached, a tall, balding man in fatigues stepped out, a tiny silver leaf pinned to his collar. He had the same broad, clueless face that West remembered. All the lines were etched deeper.

West stopped in front of him and saluted.

“At ease,” Sanderson said. “What’s your name, Sergeant?”

“West, sir.”

“Did you need something, son?”

Sanderson wasn’t ten years older than West, which put him at forty, maybe. He was still a big time operator, all right, real officer material.

“Sir, I’m over at the 33^rd under Colonel Swift. We were on a patrol today and ran across some locals, said they came from the 8011^th. A boy and his grandparents. We were ambushed and one of my guys ended up here, shot in the stomach.”

Sanderson nodded. “You’ll want to talk to Captain Anthony, he’s our chief surgeon. He oversees all of the patients.”

“Yes, sir. I was wondering if you noticed them leave the camp, though. The boy said he did cleaning for the officers.”

Sanderson made an impatient sound. “They’re all gone, son. The whole village bugged out two days ago. Every last one of ‘em.”

West blinked. “Why?”

Sanderson shook his head. “Why do these people do anything? They said there were lights on the hill, they packed their kits and started walking.”

“Lights? Sir?”

Sanderson gestured to the north. “The trees, up on that ridge. Last few nights there have been lanterns up there, those yellow paper jobs, swinging back and forth. I sent some of the boys out to look-see, but all they found was footprints in the mud. HQ says it’s nothing, a superstition.”

The priests are waving their lanterns.

“Did they say what the superstition was?”

Sanderson looked at his watch, his demeanor telling West that their reunion was almost over.

“Oh, some gobbledygook about going home,” Sanderson said. “Seems like it worked.”

The lieutenant colonel looked at West, seemed to see him for the first time. He narrowed his eyes. For the briefest of seconds, West imagined punching his teeth in.

“Well, I hope your boy makes it,” Sanderson said, dismissive, gave a brief, false smile and then walked past him.

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” West said automatically. He didn’t fully trust himself to turn around and follow Sanderson so he kept walking south, past the last camp structures, a storage unit, a supply shed. The village behind the MASH was close, less than a quarter mile away.

West passed the last string of security lights and stepped into the dark but went no further, studying the sad clusters of huts. No fires burned beneath the little houses, no lamps were lit; nothing stirred. Empty doorways yawned like black eyes. Scant light from a rising moon cast an eerie, pale ripple across the thatched roofs.

He turned and looked north – and saw the lanterns. There were at least a dozen specks of dim, glowing yellow on the dark upslope in front of the hospital, maybe a half mile away. They were spread out at different heights and distances. The way they swung and shifted, they were being carried. Easy targets if anyone got nervous.

A warning? A curse? Sanderson was no help, big surprise, but there had to be someone around who knew what was happening. He thought about the kid, his unsmiling eyes, the grandmother’s frantic speech. What had the old man said, the word that Young hadn’t known? Gangshi, something like that.

West walked back into the light of the camp. It was nothing, sure, a nothing little mystery that he’d locked onto because he was dog-tired and heart-sore… but then, why did the perfectly clear night have that electric, unstable feeling that preceded action, or a storm? Something was coming.

Maybe he’d see if he could find a ROK with some English, to explain what had scared the villagers away.

Fourteen-year-old Lee Mal-Chin was sanitizing bedpans when the three soldiers came in, two PFCs and a single stripe. Of the sixty beds in Post-Op 1 only a third were taken, mostly ROKA enlisted from a small skirmish near the DMZ the day before. Lee saw the trio stop and talk to Doctor Jimmy, who spoke at length before gesturing them towards one of the beds… the American man who’d been shot in the stomach, brought in by helicopter in the afternoon.

Lee went on with his work more slowly, listening to the soldiers talk as they made their way to the cot. He understood most of what they said. He had spent the last two years learning English with anyone who would talk to him. Mostly he talked with Father Maloney now. The father was a good teacher. There was also Corporal Timmy with the ordnance, he told Lee what Father Maloney would not say – the bad words. That Timmy was jaemi, a real gas.

The big soldier towhead was full of bad words (shit and asshole and fuck) and loudly told his buddies how he bet these gooks had never had it so good. Lee wiped out a pan with bleach water and kept his expression perfectly blank. It did not pay to draw attention, for any reason. Many of the UN gun-in hated Korea, and didn’t much like Koreans, either, for their poor and simple ways. Lee could even understand, a little. He had grown up near Seoul, the son of a shopkeeper, and his father had taken pains to see that his children were educated. Out here in the hills they didn’t have radios or newspapers. They worked the land and told traditional stories to explain the world. The village behind the 8011^th had bugged out only two days ago, when they’d seen lanterns on the hill. Choi Yeo, a man from the village, had come to warn them, telling stories of gangshi and the bad temple to the north. Nearly everyone laughed. Lee had laughed, too. The villagers were smisin-ui, they believed in magic and ghosts. Was it any wonder that the Americans treated them like children?

The three soldiers settled around the bed of the wounded man, speaking gently. The injured soldier opened his eyes and managed to smile at them. A single tear leaked from his eye. Lee was so struck by the simple joy of their meeting that he didn’t realize the big soldier had turned and was glaring at him.

“What are you looking at?”

Lee immediately looked away, lowered his head, backed up a step. He was still small enough to seem a child and could usually avoid conflict with the deungsin.

Another soldier told him to cool it. Lee didn’t look to see if the big man became cool or not, he got lost fast. Nurse Miss Jenny was taking blood pressures at the other end of the room and he found a stack of blankets that she might need.

He liked Nurse Miss Jenny – he liked all of the nurses, but Jenny had a big round bosom and a smile like sun on the river – and spent a few minutes translating for her when a ROKA soldier woke up and started asking questions. His name was Yi Sam and he didn’t remember being shot and was confused. Miss Jenny spoke slowly and clearly so that Lee could explain where he was and what had happened. Lee didn’t show off his English, but he always helped the nurses. They were kind to him in turn, they brought him rolls and sometimes chocolate. Chocolate was the best.

“Gangshi,” someone said loudly.

Miss Jenny had gone back to blood pressures, was talking at him about the upcoming movie night – it was the 8011^th’s turn to see Treasure Island – but Lee didn’t hear her anymore. A man had joined the group with the angry soldier, a tall sergeant with a hard jaw and a raspy voice. He was looking around the tent, his eyebrows raised.

“Anyone? Gangshi? Kim, you know what that means?”

A ROKA soldier three cots away who’d had his testicles and most of his right thigh blown off by a cart mine was half-sitting, staring at the sergeant. “What is he saying?” he asked, in Korean. A couple of the soldiers he’d come in with stirred. Lee had spoken with the man earlier, he was Pak Mun-Hee from north of Pusan. “Did he say gangshi?”

“Gangshi,” the American sergeant said again. “You know that word?”

Pak Mun-Hee managed a weak salute when he realized the sergeant was talking to him. One of Pak’s friends looked frightened; two others grinned.

Nurse Miss Jenny spoke up, looking directly at Lee. “Lee, isn’t that what you said when you were telling us about the bug out? Gangshi? That’s the word you used.”

Lee froze, and the tall sergeant focused his attention, stepped away from his group. “Your name is Lee? You speak English?”

“No,” Lee said. “Number ten.”

“He’s putting you on, Sergeant,” Miss Jenny said. “He speaks English real well. He told us the villagers left because of those lanterns. Because they’re calling all of the dead men home.” She smiled prettily. “Only I remember because I wrote a letter to my mother last night, and told her about it. It’s so spooky.”

Pak Mun-Hee had been speaking with his friends, and now raised his voice, calling out, “This man asks about gangshi. What is the situation here?”

Another soldier laughed, and Lee tried to smile, it was all so stupid. But there was a tension now, many of the injured talking amongst themselves, laughter and anxiety quickening the air.

The sergeant seemed to feel the urgency. He walked right up to Lee and crouched in front of him. “What does it mean, gangshi?”

Playing dumb had become so deeply ingrained that he almost didn’t answer, but the man was looking into his face, asking him, and Lee had been taught to speak right.

“The belief is that a man who die away from home, he do not rest,” Lee said. “His soul is homesick. A family hires the priest to call the man home. He… jeompeu. Jumps?”

Lee stretched his arms out in front of him, stiff, and hopped forward.

The sergeant stood up, his shoulders relaxing. After a moment, he smiled, showing all of his teeth. “So a gangshi is a jumping dead man?”

Lee nodded. “The farmers believe this old story.”

A patient cried out from across the room, a boy who was likely from a farm. His voice was high, hysterical. “We must guard against them, before it’s too late!”

Miss Jenny stood up at once, starting towards the shouter. “Now you calm down, there’s no reason to be shouting like that.”

“Jinjeong yeomso saekki,” snarled another. “It is grandmother talk!”

“Ulineun jug-eul geos-ida!” the farm boy cried.

“Dangsin-eun muji!” another said, laughing at the boy’s ignorance.

Miss Jenny called out to the other nurse on duty, Miss Claire, told her to go get someone. Doctor Jimmy was nowhere to be seen, and two of the regular evening nurses were assisting with a surgery in the OR next door.

The sergeant put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, loud. The injured ROKA soldiers all dried up at once, turning to look at him. “Calm down, boys,” he said loudly, a snap in his voice. “It’s a story.”

He was an American soldier and therefore every ROK’s superior, but it was his clear tone of dismissal that calmed them, even the shouter. Nurse Jenny looked at the sergeant with bright eyes and thanked him warmly as everyone settled down. Lee wished that he could earn a look like that, from any of the nurses.

Faintly, from somewhere to the north, he heard a bell toll, a low, carrying note, and froze. He looked at Pak Mun-Hee, who looked back at him with an expression of disbelief. Of fear.

The tall sergeant chuckled, shook his head. “Jumping dead men,” he said, and turned back to his group, and from the OR came a scream of pure terror, and the sound of metal hitting the floor, then more screams.

Captain Steven ‘Stitch’ Anthony started his shift in a fine mood. The mail had brought a funny, chatty letter from his mother, he’d tagged Jonesy out in the afternoon scratch game – twice – and all of the boys he’d fixed up were doing fine and dandy. He’d been joking around with one of his patients when Claire had called him over to see the Korean kid.

“Read me the chart,” he said, pulling the blanket down. The ROK’s belly was distended and solid.

“Twenty-year-old male presents posterior entry wound at L-1, bullet entered left of mid-sagittal and fragmented off the left lateral process of L-1, no anterior wound, fragments removed—”

“Get him prepped, I want him in the theater five minutes ago,” Stitch said. The nurses moved, God love ‘em. The kid was intubated and Anthony had a scalpel in hand before he had time to notice how rotten his mood had become.

Goddamn Gene, you sack of shit excuse for a surgeon. The major had missed a bowel cut and the kid was in trouble, peritonitis or ascites or a bleed, maybe all three. Gene had learned how to cut from a coloring book; he’d taken care of the mesenteric bundle and called it good.

Good enough for a ROK, anyway. If it had been an American kid, the major would have checked his work; he’d had the time, he just hadn’t bothered. Gene Fowler was a menace, an unskilled, humorless hack.

Lieu Jackieboy was the anesthetist, Sheryl and Linda assisted. Anthony told them to get the towels up and opened the patient’s abdominal cavity, cutting smoothly. As soon as he was in, pink water poured out and the girls sopped it up, mostly lymph and interstitial fluid but there was a nice bleed, too. Thank you, Major Gene!

Linda got retractors on the opening. It took a minute to suction out the fluid and when they were down to sponges, Anthony saw the seep of fresh blood. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

He pushed the viscera aside. “Linda, hold this, I want to take a look at the liver.”

Linda didn’t hesitate, reached into the kid and held his guts out of the way. Sheryl kept sponging. Stitch gently slipped his fingers beneath the rubbery meat of the liver and lifted. Blood spurted out in a jet, splashing the front of his gown. Motherfucker!

He set the organ down immediately but the open cavity began to fill with blood. Significant laceration of the common hepatic, and he’d apparently just made it worse. He reached under and pressed his thumb against the artery, felt it slip and slide.

“BP is a hundred over fifty,” Jackie said.

“Hemostat,” he said. “And hang another bag.”

The only reason the kid hadn’t bled out already was that there had been three pounds of liver sitting on top of the cut. Stitch kept up the pressure as Sheryl slapped a clamp into his hand, but blood kept coming. Another laceration, maybe the celiac—

“Seventy over forty,” Jackie said, his voice strained.

Stitch cursed under his breath, placed the clamp and called for another one, but the blood wasn’t spurting anymore. Weak pulses of it washed against his hand.

“BP,” he snapped.

Jackie pumped the cuff and Stitch placed a second hemostat, feeling less blood, less pressure beneath his clever fingers. Jackie pumped again, his expression grim.

“Can’t get it,” he said. “Doesn’t register.”

Stitch felt a moment of incredible frustration, of anger and despair. The kid’s heart still beat, the big, dumb muscle unaware that the body it served was already effectively dead. He looked at the kid’s face, pale and waxen, imagined the brain cells dying by the hundreds of thousands, the systems shutting down one by one, robbed of blood and oxygen and purpose. Such a fucking waste. Gene was a prick and he had screwed up but it was really the war, the goddamned war that Stitch hated, an exercise in futility paid for in young men’s lives.

He looked at the clock on the wall, and heard a bell toll somewhere, as though the world mourned the loss of the boy. A distant, plaintive sound.

“Time of death, 19:53,” he said.

Linda eased her hands out of the boy’s gut. “His name was Hei,” she said, and her voice caught. Linda had been at Frozen Chosin back in 1950, she had been to hell and back, but she still cried sometimes when they lost one.

Again, Stitch heard the lonely sound of a bell, clear and haunting on the cool October air.

“Does anyone hear that?” Jackie asked.

“It sounds like a gong or something,” Sheryl said.

Captain Anthony snapped off his bloody gloves, looking again at the boy’s lifeless face. Gene was going to be cheesed that Stitch had operated on his patient, he would be petty and defensive and wouldn’t even care that he’d killed someone. The kid had deserved better.

Hei. His name was Hei.

Hei groaned, a deep, guttural sound, and started to sit up.

Sheryl screamed and reeled back, knocking the instrument tray to the floor. Stitch automatically reached over to push Hei back down, confused, he’d heard stories of bodies contorting in death but why were his arms coming up, how was he turning to look at Sheryl with his flat dead eyes? His intestines slithered out onto the drape that covered his lower body.

Sheryl screamed again as Hei swiveled towards her, his arms straight out in front of him. She stared at the dead boy, shrieking, her eyes wide and shocked – and the skin of her face seemed to shrivel, to pucker and wrinkle around her eyes, her cheeks hollowing beneath her mask. Her screams became a breathy teakettle sound, rising, going higher – and her entire body visibly shrank. In the space of two seconds, she was shorter, smaller, as pruned as an old woman, her eyes going as flat and dead as the Korean’s.

At the same time came a sound so deep that it was a vibration. Stitch felt his bones quake.

She collapsed and the vibration stopped. Stitch saw that Hei’s skin was now quite nearly glowing, the moldy greenish-white of foxfire. Hei swung his unbent legs off the table, stiff and uncoordinated, and then he was standing, like a sleepwalker in a cartoon, his arms still straight out in front of him, his head angled so that his blank, dead expression was aimed at his own feet. His hands drooped in loose claws. The bloody drape fell to the floor and he was naked but obscenely, his viscera slapped down to cover his genitals, hitting him mid-thigh. The retractors still held the wound open and the stink of hot blood and feces filled the room. Stitch backed up a step, horrified, as Hei turned his whole body towards him.

Hei’s head hung, his eyes unseeing, and he hopped forward without seeming to bend his legs. Stitch felt it then, a sensation that he associated with giving blood, a sense of being drained, but the feeling was so much stronger and there was pain now, sudden and shocking, and he heard Linda screaming and Jackie screaming but he couldn’t look away from the boy and no longer had the strength to scream and then he was gone.

West had his personal sidearm out and was moving towards the screams even as the patients started cutting up again, their voices querulous with fear and dread. The screams were coming from behind a set of doors in the east wall. Cakes was a half-step behind, unholstering his own weapon, an M1911 pistol. West darted a look back.

“McKay, Burtoni, stay with Young,” he called. “Nurse, get some MPs in here, pronto!”

“What’s the play?” Cakes asked, just as the doors burst open and a figure in a mask and scrubs stumbled out, a man. He tripped on a cot and went sprawling, but was on his feet again in a second and running for the exit.

“Hold up!” West shouted, but the man was only interested in getting the fuck out, he didn’t look back or say boo as he charged through post-op, crashing through the door and out into the night. The screams had stopped but the patients were all talking, shouting, some of them getting up and limping after the masked man, others muttering prayers, the hysterical ROK shrieking like a girl.

“Joyong!” West shouted, the word for quiet, but no one was listening. He and Cakes had reached the doors to the next room. West looked through the window and saw a small room with sinks and towels, a bench on one side. Empty, but it looked like a scrub room. There’d be a surgery past that.

“Lee! Tell them to dry up!” he shouted, and a beat later, the kid was talking loudly, his tone harsh, chiding. Whatever he said had some effect, the din of the scared ROKs dying down. Something had definitely happened, but West was betting on a North Joe attacking his doctors. There’d been no rounds fired and the screams had apparently come from the OR. The talk about the gangshi had gotten everyone riled up, which was his own goddamn fault.

There was no noise except for the muttering patients, but for a second he felt a strange tension that was almost like a sound, one that made his back teeth clatter. He pushed through a door guarded by a tent flap, into the scrub room. It smelled like bleach and sweat and Army soap. Him and Cakes both kept their weapons aimed at the next door, moved in slow, crouching. The door was thick canvas with a window tied open. A smell of shit and blood wafted out.

West signaled for Cakes to stay put, that he was just going to look-see, and Cakes nodded. West stood and looked through the tied flap – and saw a Korean’s naked backside, the skin all over his narrow, gangly body glowing green-white, blood running down his thin legs. There was enough of an angle that West could see a loop of his intestines hanging out of his belly.

What. In hell.

The glowing man jumped at the far wall and rammed right through it, tearing down canvas and wood, shaking the whole building. The noise was terrific and West pushed through the door and fired twice at the retreating figure through the hole, the naked man hopping forward and then south, out of sight in a second.

Cool wind blew in through the ragged opening. West took in the OR, blood everywhere, the two old people on the floor, eyes dead and staring. A masked figure had pushed into the far corner, a woman on her side, curled up like a baby, her knees hugged to her chest.

Cakes stepped to the hole in the wall and leaned out, looked both ways. “I don’t see nothing. What was it, Sarge?”

West didn’t answer. He went to the nurse, crouched at her side. Behind him, he could hear the calls of the MPs or whoever had come to back them up.

“He was dead,” the nurse whispered, and then there were people outside screaming, running, and beneath it all West could hear the ringing note of a bell.

Basin, soap, water, clothespins. Major Helen Underwood was all set to wash out her personals. She’d taken to doing her own, after a couple of the girls had had some of their underthings go missing from the laundry a few months back. Some disgusting creep was probably pawing through them even now.

Underwood sneered, picking up her bra, thinking about Private Fazangas. It was revolting, the way some of them acted. Her nurses were good girls, they didn’t run around.

Her own status as a good girl – as a good woman – made her think of Captain Steve Anthony, which was confusing. They’d worked together for over a year. She respected him as a surgeon but they didn’t get along well – he was practically a protester, the way he talked, and was always turning everything into a joke. She was a married woman, and besides, she didn’t think of the men she worked with like that. Or, she hadn’t.

They’d been thrown together one night a few months ago by circumstance, traveling back from a village, caught in a firefight, shells dropping to either side of them. Their driver had been killed. She and the Captain had taken cover in an abandoned hut not far from the wreck, shaken but not injured, except the shelling didn’t stop, it had closed in. Convinced that they were going to die, they’d made love on the dirty floor, holding each other through the endless, thundering night. They hadn’t spoken of it since, not a word, but she thought about it sometimes, just before falling asleep – how they’d both trembled and wept, whispering their fears in the dark, comforting one another. How he’d felt inside of her, warm and alive. She’d made love with a man who wasn’t her husband. Was she bad now, because of what had happened?

Outside a man screamed.

Underwood dropped her soapy bra and stepped to her desk, wiping her hands on her pants. Her holstered pistol was on the card table she used as a desk. She slid the semi out of the worn leather, checked the action, and strode for the door of her tent.

Someone ran past just as she opened the flap, looking back with wide eyes. It was Corporal O’Donnell, his chubby cheeks flushed, his glasses sliding down his nose, his expression one of absolute terror.

“Run, Major!” he shrieked, and turned back to look where he was going – just as a man hopped out from behind one of the nurses’ tents, directly in front of him.

Underwood’s mouth fell open. The man was dressed in ROKA fatigues, there was a gaping hole in his chest, and she recognized him – DOA from yesterday, shot in the back – and his face and hands were glowing, the sickly light green of a night-blooming fungus. Its arms were out stiff in front of him.

O’Donnell screamed and managed to veer away but the dead soldier pivoted after him, its arms pointing at the short corporal. O’Donnell ran, and the dead man hopped towards him, its legs hardly bending. It shouldn’t have moved as fast and as far as it did but O’Donnell was getting away and then the thing was right next to him, close enough to touch him.

Underwood blinked. It had jumped forward like a grasshopper, almost too fast to see. It was stiff, its body straight, arms parallel to the ground, not shaking or wavering. It was a monster, a demon out of hell. She braced the M1911 and took aim.

“Oh, gee!” O’Donnell got out, and then he was screaming, and she fired, once, twice. The dead man was in profile, and the first shot was high but she saw the second round hit its ribs, the fabric of his shirt blown open, blood and flesh and bone pattering to the dirt on the other side. He should have gone down, why was he still standing, why was O’Donnell still screaming? There was some kind of deep vibration in the air and O’Donnell crumpled. His face had changed, his slight body somehow slighter. The dead man glowed brighter.

It sucked the life out of him.

The creature flexed its feet and was suddenly facing her. It hopped forward like a tin soldier that had been picked up and moved, its arms outstretched, its dead gaze unseeing.

She emptied her weapon, five more .45 caliber rounds, hitting it in the throat and again through the bridge of its nose. Tatters of skin and cartilage flew and she saw the goddamn holes open up in its body yet it hopped again, and a third time, and impossibly, it was right in front of her. She could smell the dead man rotting and the fresh wounds were sticky with clotted blood, almost black against the white-green skin. She could smell the heat of the rounds she’d fired, wisps of seared, decaying flesh. It stared past her with no expression, not seeing her, its jaw slack with death. It was a void.

Underwood screamed. She felt it pulling at her, drawing her life away, and she couldn’t move, trapped by whatever it was doing.

–eating me… it’s eating my life–

She could feel her body dying, the tendons and muscles tightening, shrinking, the breath being pulled from her lungs, the will to draw another one falling away.

Stitch, she thought, and was gone.

The sarge stood up and looked at Cakes. The dame in the corner was shook, all curled up in bloody whites.

“I may have seen a hopping dead man,” West said.

“No shit?”

The sarge shook his head. “I saw something.” He picked up a blanket and covered the nurse.

Cakes’ hand tightened on his weapon. The gooks were trash people, it made sense that they’d have some creepy crawlies they could hoodoo up. That stuff was for real, he knew it was, there were dark places and devils in the world. The hills of Kentucky were full of ‘em, why not a godless country like Korea? Outside, there was shouting. He heard what sounded like the blast of a .45, then another and then five more. Someone had emptied their pistol.

Two MPs charged in with their weapons drawn, barking questions. Before anyone could explain anything, the nurse with the big titties burst in and saw the dead geezers and got real upset, crying and talking about how they looked old but they weren’t, something had happened to ‘em.

“The kid, where’s that kid?” Sergeant West asked. He started back to the room with all the gook patients and one of the MPs yelled at him to stop, he needed to answer some questions. The MP had jug ears and buck teeth and a peeling sunburn on his chunky nose. He looked like he’d fallen off an ugly tree and hit every branch going down. He looked like someone’s butt.

The sarge turned around and laid it out fast. “You’ve been infiltrated, you understand? Report to your CO ASAP and tell him to push the panic button, now. Where’s your armory?”

Armory. Cakes felt something inside of him light up while Buttface stuttered out directions. He surely did love to prang a motherfucker, and how! Maybe the slant demons blew up or caught on fire or something.

Nurse Bazooms was helping the shook girl and the MPs finally clued in that something was happening outside – a man let out a yelp like he’d seen death coming, another weapon discharged, twice, then once more. People ran past the hole in the wall, going either way. Cakes could feel himself heating up, a strong, positive feeling that made his muscles twitch and his dick go half-mast. Korea was a dump and he hated Army life but clobbering gooks, that was good times.

Back in post-op it appeared that the doctors and nurses had run off. Half of the gooks were gone, too. The ones too sick to skedaddle were jabbering away at each other in their squawking, whining language. Burtoni and McKay were flanking Young, both armed and alert, watching the doors. McKay was a broke-dick dog, less fight than a Frenchman, but Burtoni was all right.

The sarge spotted the kimchi brat and called him over. He met them at Young’s cot. Young was passed out again and sawing logs.

“What happened?” Burtoni asked. “We heard shots—”

“No time,” West said. “I don’t know what’s going on but I want us armed. Me and Cakes are going to the armory, or at least to get our rifles. I want you and McKay to stay here with Young. Lee, you tell these men everything you know about the gangshi.”

The kid’s eyes widened, as much as they could. “The old story? Is it true?”

The sarge shook his head. “I don’t know. Could be.”

One of the gooks hong-yong-songed to the kid.

“He says to tell you we heard the bells,” the kid said.

“Hey, I heard a bell,” Burtoni said, looking all serious, and McKay nodded. “Right before the screamin’. Like two, maybe three times.”

Cakes hadn’t heard shit, but he didn’t hear so good anymore, not since the last time he’d pulled combat time. Goddamn mortars.

“They ring the bell to let the people know it is time, to keep inside,” the kid said.

“Who does?” the sarge asked, reloading. He carried an old Victory Model 10, a .38 revolver from WWII. “These priests?”

The kid nodded.

“So if we stay inside, we’re safe?” Burtoni asked.

“I – don’t know,” the kid said. “My family did not believe these things.”

“Ask around,” West said, snapping the cylinder home. “If anyone shows up to evac the patients, bug out with them. If we’re not back and the situation gets worse—”

He didn’t get to finish. The doors flew open and two enlisted guys ran in, their eyes wild. One of them, a corporal, had wet his pants. They scrambled to pull the doors closed, shouting out useful information.

“There’s something out there!” The one guy yelled. “It killed Major Underwood, I saw it!”

“There’s more than one!” Yelled Pee Boy. His eyes rolled in his fool head. “They’re everywhere! Bullets don’t stop ‘em!”

We’ll just see about that. Cakes had yet to meet anything that could survive a .45 to the face, and it just so happened he was a crack fucking shot. He led the way to the door, pushed past the two fumbling ladies. He held up his M1911, still fully loaded. He had one more loaded box magazine in his right leg side pocket. A total of fourteen rounds.

He looked to the sarge. West was nodding at him, holding up his revolver. The ugly MP had said southeast. Opposite corner of the camp, back by where they’d come in.

“At least you didn’t shit ‘em,” Cakes said to the corporal, and pushed open the door, ready for anything.

Burtoni watched Cakes and the Sarge run out and swallowed, felt a dry click in his throat. He didn’t like this one tiny skosh. Liked it less when he heard more weapons firing and somebody yelling for help. He thought he heard Cakes’ voice and then bam-bam-bam, close enough to make his ears ring. There were maybe ten ROKs still in the tent, three of them out cold, the rest getting more and more clanked up. What the fuck was happening?

Young was still sacked out, his eyes barely fluttering when the building had shook. Except for a tiny smile when they’d first arrived, he’d stayed unconscious.

“Ask one of ‘em if we’re safe in here,” McKay said to the kid, Lee.

Lee raised his voice and talked over the other Koreans. Burtoni had thought he was still a little kid but he acted older than he looked, repeating himself loudly until they heard him. Sounded like ooh-dee in-yo gi on da-naga.

One of the ROKs gabbled back at him. They went back and forth a couple of times, and two other ROKS joined in, then a third. None of ‘em were laughing no more and Lee listened carefully to each man before turning back to McKay.

“They say the gangshi will walk through walls to go home. They will steal a living animal’s chi – the life flow – to keep moving. In the day, they hide, they lie in caves or in the ground until the moon rises. No place is safe, unless you have… boho.” He scowled, searched for the word. “Ah, defense things?”

“So what are these defense things?” McKay asked, freckles like bloodspots on his young-looking face.

“Many things. They all say rice chaff. Ah, it must be sticky rice. He says mirrors will scare them away. He says the blood of a black dog or chicken eggs may stop them.” The kid pointed at each man as he spoke. “And he says you can kill them with fire or with an ax.”

“Swell,” said McKay. He was starting to look feverish. “And all we got is guns. This is a joke, right?”

“What do you do with the rice?” Burtoni asked.

“Outside, on the ground,” Lee said. He made a scattering motion with one hand.

“What, around the whole goddamn building?” Burtoni asked, and the kid nodded.

Burtoni reflexively fingered the small gold cross around his neck that his nonna had made him swear to keep on the whole time he was in Korea. This shit was way above his pay grade. “Unless one of you guys has got a half ton of rice in his pocket, that’s no good. What else?”

“What else nothing,” McKay said. “This isn’t for real.”

Outside, the cascading thunder of a half-dozen weapons fired at once. At least someone was getting organized while they were in here talking about zombie vampires and black dogs and rice. What the fuck was rice going to do, anyway? Burtoni couldn’t even imagine.

“If we can stay safe until morning, a rooster’s call is said to drive them away,” Lee said.

“So, what, only ten, eleven hours to go, right?” McKay asked, grinning. “No problem. We got enough of us here for poker.”

“Catch a clue, Freckles,” Burtoni said. “Something’s attacking, ain’t it? Lee, ask ‘em what else they got.”

More shots, and then that weird thing from before, like the air and the ground seemed to buzz for a few seconds. The ROK who’d flipped his wig before really started having kittens, he actually rolled off of his cot and tried to crawl for the door. One of his arms was in a cast, so it was slow going. An emergency air raid siren was blaring outside. The two guys who’d run in had retreated all the way across the long room and were holding each other like it was the end times.

“It’s a story, like the Sarge said,” McKay said, desperately looking around the room, and then the wall crashed in and everyone was shrieking.

West stepped out behind Cakes into a strung out parade of running soldiers, doctors, support staff, and a few ROKs. They were all headed different directions, shouting orders and questions at each other in passing, some saying it was a bug out, others that the North was attacking. Most of them weren’t panicking, yet, but it was a goddamn disorganized mess and it wasn’t getting better. No one was in charge. He heard the crack of a rifle, heard a woman cry out no, no, heard a Jeep start up and speed away. He looked to the hill in the north. The lanterns were gone.

He had a decision to make – step up to lead or focus on getting his own out – and no time to consider the pros and cons. He brought his fingers to his mouth and let out a sharp whistle, looking for attention. “Eyes over here, sweethearts!” he yelled, channeling his old drill sergeant.

The two or three men who even looked in his direction wore the bright blank eyes of the lizard brain… they were running and they were going to keep running. There was no decision to make, after all.

“Chogie!” he snapped, and Cakes got moving. They made it half the length of the tent before they saw the first one, jumping down a path that branched out from theirs. It was following a panicked guy who appeared to be wearing a ladies church hat, one of those pink pillbox jobs. A matching pink scarf was tied around his neck, and he had the unlit stump of a stogie clenched in his teeth. West just took it in, not arguing with what he was seeing anymore.

The lady-dressed Joe hit the main pathway and tore south, really jiving, arms swinging, nearly knocking down a pair of clerks, and West got a good look at the dead man when it jumped out into the intersection and hop-turned to follow its target. It wore the tattered remnants of a North Korean People’s Army uniform and was at least half rotten, knots and pools of black slime breaking up the pale glow of its remaining skin. Through the ragged, decaying holes in its clothing, West could see bone draped in rotten strings of meat. He could smell it, the rich, throat-clotting stench of a human body decaying in wet ground. It hopped again. The gangshi didn’t move like a man at all – it was like the kid’s pantomime, stiff, its arms held up and out, legs not bending. Other than a flex at the ankles, it didn’t seem to move a muscle but was somehow closing on the running man, a hop and then a blurry burst of impossible speed.

“Aw, what’s this hooey?” Cakes muttered, raising his sidearm.

In a second, the dead man was at the corporal’s side. The guy shrieked, tumbled and fell, his lacy topper tumbling to the dirt. He stared up at the monster.

“Go back to hell, ya gook devil!” Cakes yelled and fired, bam-bam-bam.

All three were head shots and West felt a surge of triumph, nobody like Cakes! Rot and flesh exploded, and the back half of the thing’s skull actually fell off, landing at the feet of its victim. A gory mass of shattered bone and rancid flesh and matted hair was all that remained where its head had been, a misshapen, dripping bag sinking down to hang in front of the creature’s chest – but it was still standing, unwavering, its rotting arms stretched out and aimed at the howling cross-dresser. The man literally shriveled up, his cries rasping to silence, his skin wrinkling, and the air hummed and then the gangshi turned and was hopping west again, the bag of its head flopping against its breastbone, spilling gore like a paper bag full of sick. It was all over in seconds.

“Go!” West pushed Cakes, got him moving. Its head had gone, and it still got to the sad sack in the pink hat. It had eaten him up and hopped away. This was shit for the birds. “Try the knees next time!”

They ran, stopping at the open spaces, pushing past panicking soldiers. Weapons were discharged from all areas of the camp. The men were sloppy, disorganized, terrified, and West spared a dark thought for Sanderson. The doctors might be top-notch, but the CO obviously hadn’t run drills or maintained any level of training.

Somebody shouted that there was one by the mess and a small surge of stumbling enlisted and low-level officers nearly knocked them down trying to get away, stampeding like cattle. He saw a sergeant leading a handful of armed men west towards the center of the camp, two with combat shotguns, one with a rifle and a belt.

Praise Jesus, someone was putting up a defense!

West’s optimism was short lived. As he and Cakes passed the wide opening where their paths intersected, he looked down and saw three gangshi moving towards the soldiers, coming from the west. One was the man he’d seen busting out of the OR – thin and gangly, naked, his guts swinging in the breeze. Some kind of surgical vise had been secured in his belly, holding the flesh open. His face was the blank of death, and his whole body glowed that otherworldly green. The other two wore ROK fatigues and weren’t visibly disfigured but couldn’t be mistaken for living, with the pallid glow of their skin and their dead eyes and their weird puppet postures. As he watched, all three hopped forward as one.

“Fire!” The captain pointed his own standard issue at the closest creature and opened up. Then they were all firing, and the gangshi hopped closer, oblivious to the damage, homing in on their targets. Their drooping faces showed no pain, no awareness, no mercy, not even hunger.

West didn’t wait to see what happened, he knew what was coming and they had to get armed and back under cover before the compound cleared out. They ran ahead, chased by screams from the soldiers.

The motor pool was lit up, Jeeps revving, gears grinding. A captain was organizing a handful of people to evacuate the patients, but he was mostly drowned out by the engines.

“Holy cow!” a private cried, his voice cracking. “Look at ‘em all!”

West turned and looked, out into the dark behind the compound. There were a dozen, two dozen of them, glowing, hopping dead men coming from every direction, heading in every direction. He thought of crickets, or locusts. They moved erratically, a small hop, a bigger one – and then a sudden blur of motion and the thing was twenty feet away from its last position. It hurt West’s mind to see them move. East and west, they hopped over the hills or behind the trees, in and out of sight. A handful filtered through the deserted village, stumbling right through some of the little hooches, their arms straight in front of them. Some were moving south; more were headed for the MASH.

“Armory,” said Cakes, and pointed to a small crowd in front of a Quonset. A corporal and three privates were handing out arms, mostly M2 carbines and boxes of cartridges. They were blocking the door. The air shook again with that deep, physically unpleasant sound. West thought maybe it was the gangshi feeding.

West pushed to the front. “We need something bigger. What else have you got?”

The corporal’s voice shook. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? What’s your armament?”

“I drive an ambulance,” the young man said. “Look for yourself, we’re bugging out.”

He and a handful of the soldiers took off running towards the deserting Jeeps.

West and Cakes pushed into the unlocked room. Inside were two long, cramped aisles maintained for shit – empty racks next to over-packed ones, boxes stacked on boxes in no order. Outside there was screaming and shouting and more of that terrible vibration.

“Find us something,” West said, and Cakes started hefting and tossing.

West saw a rack of shotguns and went to investigate. A half-dozen 20-gauge Ithaca 37s, and seven cases of 28-gauge shells. Useless. Someone had stuck a captured Soviet burp gun behind a stack of dented helmets. He was hopeful for a split second – the PPSh-41 was shit at any distance but up close it could spray a lot of lead, fast – but the sole long box magazine was empty.

Does it matter, anyway? He hadn’t wanted to think about it, was planning to assess after he’d seen their firepower options, but that one that had killed the man in pink – it didn’t have a head. No head, and just as lively as a square-dance. Unless the kid could come up with some folk magic remedy, West wasn’t hopeful at their chances.

“I got us three working M1s and a shitload of Willie Petes,” Cakes said. “M15s, though, they don’t explode.”

White phosphorous signaling grenades. Maybe. Fire killed everything. He reached for the heavy, clinking bag of .45 rounds that Cakes had filled, shouldered it, and took two of the M1s. “Bring ‘em, whatever you can carry. Maybe these things will burn.”

Outside, someone had finally had the presence of mind to hit the air raid siren, and the rising, falling wail of it drowned out the world.

The gangshi burst in through the corner of post-op near the scrub room, directly in front of the two men who’d run inside, and then everyone was screaming. Broken wood and bent metal framed the glowing dead man, clothed in the peasant garb of a farmer. Its body had bloated in recent death; the creature looked swollen, puffy, the man’s face as round and shining as the moon. Dust rained down from the ceiling. One of the two men who’d run in – Lee knew he was with the motor pool but didn’t know his name – tried to get away and could not. The gangshi had already fixed its lifeless attention on him. The man shrieked in fear and then agony as the gangshi absorbed his chi. His body withered and dried and shrunk as his energy was stolen away and Lee could feel the shudder of shifting balance, imagined that the terrible vibration was the sound of distortion in the universe.

The ROKs cried out and somehow found legs, falling, running, crawling beneath cots. The farm boy on the floor kicked his feet, shrieking, and the gangshi turned its whole body towards the movement. Farm boy screamed. He’d pulled out the stitches in his side in his struggles. Fresh blood seeped through his bandages.

“No! No!” he yelled, as the gangshi hopped closer, and then the sounds he was making changed, from fear to terror to pain. The gangshi had connected with him. As the farm boy’s skinny body depleted, the bloated man shone more brightly, rich with chi.

If it is full… No one had suggested that the gangshi could get full, but surely they could not absorb more chi than a body could hold.

“Be still,” Lee said to the Americans. “Don’t make it see you.”

The dark haired man – the tall sergeant had called him Burtoni – immediately froze, his eyes cast down. The other one with jugeunkkae on his face, McKay, tried to hold still but he was so afraid. He shook and he could not look away from the gangshi, could not make himself calm. Lee didn’t want to die but thought that McKay was going to crack and bring the gangshi to them. Lee closed his eyes and thought of his family.

Pak Mun-Hee chose the moment to cry out to God, tongsung kido, to plead forgiveness for his sins. The ganshi’s feet shifted, and it hopped towards Pak. The ROK cried out and fell back, unable to get up from his cot. He knocked over a tray of syringes that Nurse Miss Jenny had been preparing and the polished metal tray clattered to the ground. Glass broke. Overhead light splashed across the tray and Lee was up and moving. One word was in his head. Mirror.

Lee scooped up the metal tray as the bloated gangshi connected to Pak Mun-Hee from an arm’s distance away, stilling his frantic movements, trapping him in the unnatural exchange. Lee thrust the tray up in front of the gangshi, breaking the connection, forcing the gangshi to confront his own reflection. The tray seemed to vibrate in his hands. Lee did not look at the creature or at Pak Mun-Hee. He squeezed his eyes shut.

For a moment nothing at all happened, and Lee felt sweat break out all over his body. And then a horrible, high-pitched keening erupted from the gangshi. Lee risked a glance. There was no change in the dead, bloated face but the keening cry went on and on, the sound of fury and hate and fear spilling from its lifeless throat. It was a terrible sound.

The gangshi shifted on its bare feet and hopped back outside, moving almost too quickly to see. It was there and then it was gone.

Lee felt his knees give out and collapsed. Pak Mun-Hee sobbing, thanked him, thanked God. Burtoni was with him in a second, pulling him to his feet, dragging him back to their friend’s cot. Outside, men screamed and fired weapons.

“The story of the mirror, it is true,” Lee said. What a terrible cry! Thinking of it made his knees feel weak again.

“Okay, okay, this’ll work,” Burtoni said. “There’s trays all over the place. We can put ‘em on the patients, maybe hang them from the walls—”

McKay laughed, a high-pitched, rising sound. His gaze darted back and forth, back and forth. “Right, they’re scared,” he said, and laughed again. “They’re scared! They’re not real, but they see themselves and they run away!”

He couldn’t control his laughter now, holding himself, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. Burtoni looked at Lee, met his gaze. Lee could see his thoughts, and agreed. McKay was michin geos. Shook.

Burtoni turned a scornful eye on McKay. “Get ahold of yourself, or I’ll slap you in the puss. What are you, a girl?”

“They’ll be scared,” McKay whispered, wiping his eyes, still grinning. “But they’re not even real.”

“Yeah, that’s a laugh riot,” Burtoni said. “Come on, help me push the cots together. Lee, get as many of those trays as you can carry.”

Lee nodded and McKay at least got up to help Burtoni, still chuckling helplessly. Lee ran for the bins of sterilized trays, unable to believe that he’d been able to act. Perhaps because he was still unable to believe that the villagers had been right, that the dead had been called home.

The building shook and another gangshi crashed into the room through the south wall. The cabinets there fell to the ground and broke, scattering bandages and suture kits. Lee snatched up the trays and headed back for where the Americans had shoved several cots, Pak Mun-Hee, the wounded American, and two of the unconscious men. He looked back over his shoulder, afraid that it was fixing on him but it only stood there, stupid and dead. They would hold up the trays and be safe, they would—

Lee realized what he was seeing. The gangshi’s eyes were gone, dark holes where they should have been. Its whole face had been gnawed and picked at, as though it had been outside on the ground for a long time. A splinter of cartilage was all that remained of its nose. Its cheeks and lips were gone, chewed down to a wide yellow grin. Its tattered shirt was full of new holes. Lee skidded to his knees next to the cots and passed out the trays, sick with new fear. How would it see its reflection without eyes?

Through the holes in the building they could see men running, they could hear trucks driving away.

The eyeless gangshi pivoted towards Lee, and the injured and the cots, huddled together in a great obvious lump, trays sliding to the floor and clattering. Burtoni was whispering a Hail Mary, holding a silver tray over his face. McKay shook, his expression a frozen grin, his eyes full of tears.

The doors to post op slammed open and the doctor, Captain Elliott, came running in with two orderlies and Nurse Miss Claire. They saw the gangshi and stopped, backing towards the door. One of the orderlies made the sign of the cross in the air.

Lee saw what McKay was going to do a second before he did it, but was too late to try and stop him.

McKay stood up, his metal tray falling to the ground, pointing his weapon at the faceless creature. “You’re not real!” he yelled, and then fired and the gangshi hopped once more and was with him, ignorant to the fresh holes in its head and body. McKay screamed and was caught, staring into the chopped mask of flesh. His body began to change, to shrivel up.

“Fire in the hole!” someone called out, and Burtoni pulled his unconscious buddy’s cot over on top of them, slapped an arm around Lee, and slammed them both to the ground.

There was a clatter and then a soft pop and then the air was alive with snakes, with the smoking hot glow of burning phosphorous. The heat was sudden and searing, the light blinding. The gangshi was enveloped in a hissing, electric white shower and Lee had to look away. It was so bright he could see it through his eyelids, and then there were curses and screams and he felt burning particles settle across the backs of his bare legs. He pulled them in, made himself small beneath Burtoni’s heavy arm.

The hissing went on seemingly forever and as it died away Lee dared to look up. Coughing, he waved at the thick, burnt-meat smoke and saw a pile of burning flesh and bone and fabric where the gangshi had been. The doctor and the orderlies were running around and putting out small fires. The holes in the building let out the worst of the smoke but the chemical stink was terrible, like bad garlic, and Lee’s eyes burned and his nose ran.

The two big American soldiers were back, the sergeant and the private with the bad words. The private was spinning a ring around his finger.

“Looks like fireworks,” he said loudly, and coughed.

The GIs helped the doc get the patients loaded into a personnel carrier, Young and five others, plus a handful of camp workers who’d been injured in the attack. All around them chaos reigned. Groups of soldiers ran and fired, yelled and died. A goodly number were getting out, trucks and jeeps heading in all directions. Cakes kept up a steady screen of Willie Petes, the white-hot burning chemicals keeping the gangshi away from them. They wouldn’t jump through one, anyway. Burtoni helped the orderlies carry the patients out, while Lee and the medical officers ran supplies. West watched their backs toward the north, the black hill where the lanterns had been. Outside the brilliantly lit corridor of hissing phosphorous, dimly glowing gangshi hopped and darted silently across the dark land.

There were hundreds of them now, tearing through the MASH buildings, demolishing the tent town on their way to wherever. Main power went out – the generators were dying – and the wailing siren finally wound to a stop. West saw a Jeep whip by with Sanderson peering out the back, dull confusion on his useless face. West didn’t salute.

The doctor made his last trip out of the sagging post-op building holding a clinking duffel bag. Burtoni ran alongside him, holding up a metal instrument tray like a shield.

“We’re bugging out, Sergeant West,” the doctor said. “Get your men in the truck.”

“Yeah, Sarge, we gotta go,” Burtoni said, nodding emphatically.

“What about the priests?” West asked, gesturing vaguely towards the dark hill north of the camp, where he’d seen the lanterns. “If we don’t stop them, they’ll keep calling up more of these things, won’t they?”

“I don’t know anything about any priests,” the doctor said. “I’m getting these men out of here, now. We’re going south to the 124^th.”

The Korean kid was looking at West. “The man from the village, he said the temple is rotten. He said the priests follow a bad man.”

“Bad how?” Burtoni asked.

“He is michin,” Lee said. “Ah, wrong in the head. Stark staring bonkers.”

“You know where this temple is?”

Burtoni was shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter about no temple, we gotta go, Sarge. We should stay with Young, right?”

Lee pointed. “North, they said. High on the hill, in the woods.”

West imagined bugging out with the doctor, with the other MASH refugees. Maybe it was safe at the 124th, maybe not. The way these things moved, where was safe? And how long would it take, to convince someone with the authority to call in a strike this far south?

And then hope we hit the bad temple with the bad priest, and hope that actually stops the dead from hopping around. For Pete’s sake, he was looking at the goddamn things and he didn’t believe in them. Who would listen? How many more people would die before they could talk the brass into believing ghost stories? They had a chance to stop this here, now.

“Burtoni, Cakes, bug out with Young,” he said, making the decision as he spoke. Fuck Sanderson, anyway. The buck had to stop somewhere.

“I’m going with you,” Cakes said. West had known he would.

“I’ll go with Young,” Burtoni said.

“Aw, don’t break a heel running,” Cakes sneered at him. “We’re going after ‘em, aren’t we, Sarge? Gonna prang those hoodoo gooks!”

Cakes’ enthusiasm was both disturbing and welcome. “We’re closest and we’ve got the news,” West said. “May as well be us.”

“I go with you,” Lee said.

“Forget it, kid,” West said. “You bug out with the captain.”

Lee shook his head. “You need me, to talk to the priest. To stop the gangshi.”

The kid gestured at the darkness beyond the stuttering Willie Pete. “It is wrong to make them walk again.”

The simple words seemed to resonate with all of them. Two years of men dying for scraps of territory, to be on the side with the most when the agreements were finally signed. It was all so pointless, so crazy.

Burtoni gripped his metal tray and his M1 and looked between West and the truck, the kid and Cakes. His struggle was clear on his hang-dog face, stark black and white by the light of the hissing grenade.

“Don’t go bleeding all over everything, making up your mind,” Cakes said.

“Fuck you, Cakes,” Burtoni said, then sagged. “Okay. Okay, I’m in.”

“Let’s get a ride,” West said.

A tiny little fleck of white phosphorous had landed on Cakes’ right leg when he’d blown the shit out of that monster in the hospital ward, and that little piece had burned deep. It wasn’t bleeding but it hurt like hell. Cakes was limping by the time they snagged a Jeep, lighting their way to the motor pool with Willie Petes, dodging the blindly hopping gooks through the ruined MASH. Sarge made him sit in the back with his leg up and had Burtoni drive. The gook kid was the only one small enough to fit in the back seat with him.

The kid pointed them along a steep road north that cut back and forth through the woods. As the MASH fell behind them, Cakes dug through their bags, seeing what they had left to work with. It could be worse. He found the loose box mags for the M1s and a carton of rounds. Wincing at the pain in his leg – it was swelling, too – he started loading.

“You been to this temple before, Lee?” the sarge called back.

“No,” said the gook kid. “Only the villagers told us about it. It is by the road north.”

Cakes looked at him. “Ain’t you a villager?”

“No.” The kid gazed at him with flat eyes. “I am KATUSA, with the MASH.”

Korean Augmentation To the United States Army. Cakes snorted. Bunch of starving refugees digging shitholes and hauling sandbags.

“You have family with you?” the sarge asked, raising his voice to be heard over the grind of the Jeep’s lower gears. The grade was steep and bumpy as hell. Burtoni was a shit driver.

“No,” the kid said. “No family.”

He didn’t sound whiny or look all heart-broke about it, just said it, matter of fact.

“What happened to ‘em?” Cakes asked.

“We were on the Hangang Bridge two days after 625,” the kid said. “In the early morning. Our army blew it up to stop the North from advancing into Seoul. I would have died, too, except my father sent me ahead to find out why no one was moving.”

Cakes wasn’t sure what to say to that. He tried to imagine all his relations, his parents and sisters and cousins and grandparents, all blown up at once. He couldn’t do it.

“After that, many of us walked all the way to Pusan,” he went on. “I was there in September 1950 when the first UN soldiers landed.”

“Fuckin’ marines,” Cakes said, and shook his head. “Think their shit don’t stink.”

The kid smiled a little. “Hey, I got a Marine joke.”

“You’ve got a Marine joke?” Cakes snorted. “Let’s hear it.”

The kid nodded, smiling a little more. “A dogface and a marine are walking down the street, and they see a kid playing with a ball of shit. The dogface says, what are you making? The kid says, a dogface. The dogface says, why aren’t you making a marine? The kid goes, I don’t have enough shit.”

Not enough shit to make a marine, that was a good one! Cakes laughed. The kid had more hard bark on him than Burtoni, anyway.

“You getting an inventory?” the sarge called back.

Cakes kept loading. “We got eight signal grenades left, four extra mags of .45 ACP for the M1911s plus about forty rounds, six full clips of thirty-aught-six for the M1s plus a carton loose.”

“There are the silver trays,” Lee said. He held a stack of them in his lap. “We saw one run from its reflection.”

West looked back at them. “We’re going in ready but we’re gonna talk to them first, okay? See if we can’t persuade these guys to stop what they’re doing…” He trailed off, staring out the back.

Cakes craned his head around and looked.

A pale green glimmer far back on the road was suddenly closer, close enough for Cakes to see the outstretched arms, the hanging face. It hopped forward and then was falling away, standing still as they drove on.

“Hey, I think this is it,” Burtoni said. “There’s some hooches up here on the left—”

Cakes was watching the devil recede, and it was some strange trick of the eye, that its narrow hands were suddenly pressed to the back flap of the moving Jeep. They’d left it behind but now it was right on them, its mouth hanging open drooling and stupid, one of its eyes stuck closed, its skin glowing like radium.

There was one of them right in front of the Jeep, out of the goddamn blue. Burtoni swerved, fighting the machine for control and then they were slamming to a stop, almost rolling, settling back to the rocky dirt with a jaw-slamming bounce. Burtoni felt the steering wheel stomp on his chest and he gasped for air. The Jeep died, leaving them in the dark.

“Move out!”

Burtoni grabbed his rifle and stumbled out of the Jeep, looking everywhere, holding on to one of the MASH’s metal instrument trays. There were two, three of the things closing in. One of them hopped closer to the sarge, fixing its lifeless attention to him like a moth fixed to a light. It was a young ROK with a big dent in one side of its head. The eye on that side had bulged out, giving it an almost comically lopsided look.

“Head for the buildings!” West said, falling back. Cakes ignored him, aiming his M1 at the creature’s legs. He opened up and put all eight rounds of Springfield through the thing’s knees, the Garand’s clip ejecting with an audible ping.

The gangshi hopped forward on its broken, shredded legs, shorter by a foot and a half but still holding its arms out, leering up at the sarge with that bulging eye. It was almost close enough to the sarge to touch him.

“Catch!” the kid yelled, and swung one of the surgical trays at Cakes.

Cakes caught the tray and pivoted with it, smashing the gangshi in the face, knocking it backwards.

“No, use it like a mirror!” Burtoni screamed. He held up his own tray, shook it. “Like a mirror!”

Cakes didn’t seem to hear, banging the tray into the creature’s face again and again. Another of the things moved in. Cakes gave up on the tray, dropping it, taking a Willie Pete out of his shoulder bag. The Sarge waved them all back.

“Fire in the hole!” Cakes yelled.

Burtoni stumbled backwards, yeah, burn that mother, he thought—

—and then his thoughts were strange, running together, and Lee was shouting and dancing around, something was wrong.

Burtoni turned and there was a middle-aged man with a bad haircut and a bullet hole in one temple in front of him, staring at him, its peeling white fingers brushing against the front of his shirt.

“No,” Burtoni breathed, unable to believe it, unable to move or think anymore because the thing was pulling him away, stealing him from the world and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t goddamn fair, he should have bugged out when he had the chance.

“No, no, no!” West screamed. The monster had Burtoni and it was already too late, the kid’s long, wolfish face was collapsing inward, his quick eyes rolling back in his head. In a few seconds he was a husk on the ground.

Cakes pulled a pin, threw, pulled another one. The world exploded in a fountain of bitter white and West shielded his eyes, his heart torn up. The ganghsi burned, hopped and melted, collapsing silently as the fire ate their rotten skin.

“The buildings, chogie!” he shouted, ducking away from the brilliant light, running for Lee. He never should have let the kid come, he wasn’t thinking straight.

Cakes ran with him and they caught up to Lee, flanked him, heading for the hooches. Behind them, the phosphorous hissed and muttered. Dim figures flitted through the trees, flickered through plumes of white smoke and the dull orange of burning fat. More of them were coming.

They reached the first raised shack and ran past it, West pointing them north, there was a clearing past another of the small buildings – and there were people in the clearing, ten, a dozen of them, men, sitting around a fire. They wore homespun robes of dull brown. Behind them was a tall, narrow building, presumably the temple.

West looked back and saw more of the creatures hopping after them. They’d be dead ducks in the time it took for one of the things to do its impossible jump. No time for recon or diplomatic talks.

“Back us up, Cakes,” West said. It was all he had time to say as they ran into the clearing, chased by the gangshi. West moved in front of Lee and stopped at one of the sitting men. He pointed his revolver at the man’s head.

The man was older, his face lined and careworn. He stared into the fire. All of them just stared into the fire, completely ignoring West, not moving an inch.

“Lee! Tell them to stop these things or I kill this one!”

Lee shouted at them, his voice harsh, threatening. The men didn’t look away from the fire, but one of them spoke briefly. A man about West’s age, sitting on the other side of the fire. His voice was a monotone.

Lee blinked at West. “He says go ahead. He says they are already home.”

“Sarge!” Cakes’ voice was an urgent stage whisper. West turned and saw that a half dozen of the gangshi had gathered behind them, at the outermost edge of the fire’s flickering light. They clumped together, dead and stinking, their arms outstretched… but they didn’t come any closer. Couldn’t, maybe.

West looked helplessly at the circle of men, still aiming at the older man’s head. He didn’t want to shoot the guy, didn’t want to kill anyone, only wanted them to stop whatever it was they were doing.

“Ask them why,” he said. “Why are they doing this?”

Lee asked, and another of the men spoke, not looking away from the fire. Lee translated as the man droned, his voice steady and toneless, firelight dancing in his blank eyes.

“In every war for a thousand years people have died here, victims of needless slaughter. Innocents, monks and priests, healers, men who have refused to take up arms. The stones are washed in their blood. They called the Master, who speaks for them now. He is their channel. They cry for the killing to stop.”

West shook his head. “So… you sent out dead men to kill more people?”

Lee spoke for him, and another man took up the narrative. “The Master tell us that when everyone has gone home, the wars will end. There will be no more bloodshed, here or anywhere.”

West stared at the circle of motionless men, unable to believe what he was hearing. “That’s what you believe? That what you’re doing here will stop war, forever? That we’re all just going to change?”

The men didn’t answer when Lee stopped speaking, staring into the fire, but one, two of them shifted, breaking their perfect stillness. West looked back. The gathering gangshi edged closer, as though the circle of protection cast by the firelight had shrunk. Cakes held up one of the grenades, looking to West for a signal.

“You don’t understand,” another of the men said finally. “You don’t belong here. You should go home.”

“Jesus please-us, are these gooks numb in the head?” Cakes muttered.

“Have you been out there?” West asked, not realizing how angry he was until he heard it in his voice. “Have you seen what you’ve done?”

He jabbed a finger at the gangshi, still edging closer. There were three more of them, their dead faces staring, their arms reaching. More of the sitting priests shifted. He could see that their concentration was breaking. One of them stole an uneasy glance at the dead.

“You made monsters out of your own people,” West said. “You called up their sad sacks of bones and turned them into killers.”

More of the priests were looking now. The firelight flickered, painting the dead faces in strange light. One of the gangshi hopped forward a tiny step and two of the priests were suddenly on their feet, backing towards the narrow temple building.

One of the sitting men snapped at them, his voice urgent, but neither responded, still backing away. He repeated his command, added something in a rising shout.

“He tells them return to the circle,” Lee said. “Return or we are all lost!”

One of the sitting priests pushed up on his knees. From under his loose shirt, he pulled a small hammered blade, held it up. “Naneun nae insaeng ui maseuteo leul boho!”

Before he’d finished speaking a second man was doing the same, a third, their words overlapping, two more knives held up.

Lee was pale. “I protect the master with my life.”

“Oh, shit,” West said, as all three of the men cut their own throats and fell, blood spurting out into the ground. One of them hadn’t cut deep or far enough and was pumping a narrow stream of blood across a few of his fellow priests. He flopped around on the ground, spraying like a fountain. Blood hissed into the fire.

Most of the priests were on their feet and many held knives but they didn’t seem to know what they wanted to do, whether to join their suicidal brothers or run for it. West looked back and saw the gangshi hopping forward, entering the clearing. Whatever the priests had been doing to keep the dead men at bay, they weren’t doing it anymore.

“Here they come!” Cakes shouted, and threw the M15. Lee saw it hit one of the gangshi in the chest and turned away, saw his own shadow black on the ground against the sudden brilliance of hissing white light.

“Move, move!” The sergeant shouted, pushing Lee towards the temple. Lee ran. Three of the priests ran with him. He saw a knife on the ground and scooped it up, pushing past one of the priests who’d frozen, who hadn’t decided to stay or go.

The temple door was open. The trio of robed men ran inside, calling for their Master. Lee stopped outside and turned back, searching for Sergeant West and Cakes in the chaos, fountains of light and smoke and the silent, glowing dead, hopping and freezing, blurring as they darted forward.

Around the fire, two of the three men who’d killed themselves rose, their bodies stiff, their arms stretched out. The third rose a moment later as the first vibrations shook the world. The priests unable to choose were falling now, fed upon by their dead brothers. Lee held his metal tray out to the grisly scene, blocking it from view.

Lee heard Cakes before he saw him, cursing more than Lee had ever heard anyone curse, taunting the gangshi. Lee saw how far away from the church they were and felt his chest go tight. It was too far.

The sarge fired his revolver into the crowd of gangshi, trying to cover Cakes as the private threw more grenades, but the bullets did nothing. The gangshi were too close and there were too many of them and Cakes was retreating too slowly. Lee opened his mouth to cry a warning but then there was a blur of green light and it was too late.

“I got this one, Sarge!” Cakes shrieked and stepped into the creature, popping rings on the M15s in his arms. He reached out and grabbed a second dead man, his grenades spilling to the ground.

Sergeant West turned and ran for the temple, his face a mask of hard-jawed determination, his eyes anguished. Behind him, Cakes screamed, enveloped by white light. Smoke billowed over the gangshi, the clearing, the world.

Two of the priests tried to close the door but Lee kicked at them, brandished the cheap knife he’d picked up, and then West was pushing through, knocking one of the priests to the ground.

Lee turned and looked at the church, finally. It was a single room, bare except for some rolled mats. It was cold and smelled of decay. At the far end, an old man was lying on the floor, lamps burning by his head and feet. The priests hurried to him, casting frightened looks back at West and Lee. There were only three of them now.

“Is that their master?” West said, starting after them. Lee had to run to keep up. Behind them, the door was crashed off its hinges. A gangshi stood in the jagged frame, white, choking smoke pouring in all around its stiff body.

The priests called for their master to wake, whining voices full of fear. When they saw West and Lee approaching, West holding his revolver, all three of them stood.

“I protect the master with my life!” one of them shouted, and they all ran at West. He shot the first one in the chest but the others crashed into him, all of them collapsing in a tangle of limbs. The revolver went off again.

The building shook as another gangshi thundered through the wall. It was one of the dead priests. Fresh blood oozed from its glowing neck, its head hanging. It hopped forward and was halfway to where the sergeant struggled. Behind it, a third gangshi hopped inside through the ragged hole, a very old and rotten one.

Lee knelt by the old man, the mad master. He didn’t look special or important. His eyes were open, staring at the air, but he was alive, Lee could see the rise and fall of his chest.

“This has to stop now,” Lee said, and drove the cheap knife into the man’s wrinkled neck, deep, pushing as hard as he could.

The Master made a choking sound in his throat. Awareness flooded back into his eyes, and he looked at Lee, who saw depths of madness in his tired old face; suffering and loss and despair twisted into something dark and consuming. When he pulled out the knife, blood poured onto the dirt floor.

The three gangshi inside the church crumpled, suddenly boneless. For a moment there was a sound in the air like the fluttering of wings, but perhaps it was only the last, spluttering hisses of the white phosphorous burning itself to death outside.

The sergeant held his revolver by the barrel and hit the last struggling priest in the head with the gun’s grip. The man groaned and fell away, holding his skull.

West sat up and looked around, taking in the scene. The fallen gangshi. The dead master. The bloody knife in Lee’s hands.

“Good,” he said, and nodded. “Good deal. You okay?”

Lee started to say yes but then shook his head. It was terrible, the thing he’d done, but he wasn’t sorry. The man’s blood was still warm on his hands and he was glad that he’d killed him, he wished he could kill him again, for making the dead walk. He tried never to think of it but the idea that his own family might not be at rest haunted him. Sometimes, it was all he could do not to think about it.

“I don’t know how to feel,” Lee said.

The sergeant looked at him for a long time. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, it’s like that sometimes. Let’s get out of here, what do you say?”

Lee nodded. The church was cold, the air heavy with blood and smoke and maybe ghosts.

The ground outside was littered with corpses. The gangshi had lost their glow, were only dead now, heaps of skin and bones and clothes. They passed what was left of Cakes and then Burtoni, but the sarge didn’t look at them, and told Lee not to look, either. He said they were good guys, and his voice broke a little.

Lee thought they might talk on the long walk back to where the MASH had been, but neither of them did. As they came down out of the woods, the sky opened up over them, clear and beautiful, and they walked on in silence, occasionally slowing to look at the stars, to breathe in the air.